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‘Savage Mode II’ Tops the Charts

Jason Tate

The collaboration between 21 Savage and Metro Boomin, Savage Mode II, is the number one album this week.

Of Savage Mode II’s 171,000 units earned in the tracking week ending Oct. 8, SEA units comprise 148,000 (equaling 200.1 million on-demand streams of the album’s songs), album sales total 22,000 (helped in part by merchandise/album bundles) and TEA units comprise 1,000.

LANY also got their first top ten album:

LANY scores its highest charting album, and first top 10, as the trio’s Mama’s Boy bows at No. 7 with 55,000 equivalent album units earned. Of that figure, 46,000 are from album sales (assisted by merchandise/album bundles), 9,000 from SEA units (equating to 11.5 million in on-demand streams of the album’s songs) and a negligible sum from TEA units.

Tom DeLonge Directing Sci-Fi Film

Tom Delonge
Jason Tate

Deadline:

Tom DeLonge, former frontman of punk rock band Blink-182, is to make his directorial debut with a coming-of-age sci-fi feature film Monsters of California.

DeLonge, who has, in recent years, been getting more attention due to his passion for UFOs, is directing the film based off an original script that he wrote with Ian Miller. […]

Monsters of California is a coming of age adventure with a science fiction twist that follows teenager Dallas Edwards, played by Samson, and his derelict friends on a quest for the meaning behind a series of mysterious, paranormal events in Southern California.  The truths they uncover begin to unravel extraordinary secrets held tightly within the deepest levels of the Government.

Pay-for-Play Was Banned From Radio — But Texts Reveal It May Still Be Thriving

Rolling Stone
Jason Tate

Elias Leight, writing at Rolling Stone:

In June 2019, Mitch Mills, a senior vice president of radio promotion at Elektra Records, sent an urgent text to Steve Zap, an independent radio promoter who works with a number of stations in the adult contemporary format. The pair are both longtime players in the music industry, and have texted each other periodically about Warner Music Group acts, including Panic! at the Disco, Twenty One Pilots, and Fitz and the Tantrums. The June 2019 text shows that Mills was worried because Panic! at the Disco were receiving fewer plays than they had the previous week on a station Zap oversaw. “Stevie … [down] 11 in panic,” Mills wrote. “I just did a 2k deal with you … I need Panic back up.”

The text is one of more than 2,500 messages involving Zap that have been obtained by Rolling Stone. A number of these texts, covering 2018 to July of this year, refer to conversations with major label executives about promotional giveaways and payments to a radio station in connection with airplay – practices that have supposedly been banned.

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Machine Gun Kelly Tops the Charts

Machine Gun Kelly
Jason Tate

Machine Gun Kelly has the number one album in the country this week:

The set earned 126,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in the week ending Oct. 1, according to Nielsen Music/MRC Data. It was released on Sept. 25 via EST19XX/Bad Boy/Interscope, and marks the fifth top 10 effort overall for the artist. […]

Notably, Tickets to My Downfall marks the first rock album at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in over a year. The last rock set to top the tally was Tool’s Fear Inoculum, which bowed at No. 1 on the Sept. 14, 2019-dated list and spent one week in charge.

Panic! at the Disco’s Flourishes Weren’t Just Dramatic. They Were Theater.

Panic! at the Disco
Jason Tate

Maya Phillips, writing at The New York Times, looks back on Panic! at the Disco’s debut:

Fifteen years ago, a mysterious top-hatted figure and a parade of circus performers interrupted a wedding in a music video with an unconventional soundtrack: an energetic pop-punk song with a bouncy, carnivalesque cello opening.

This is how Panic! at the Disco announced itself in the “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” video, the first from its 2005 debut album, “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out.” Though the band has undergone many reinventions in the years since, it’s closely associated with its original aesthetic: a distinctive theatrical sensibility that drew on the sound of early 2000s pop-punk while also referencing vintage performance styles — burlesque, vaudeville, old Broadway musicals — to illustrate themes of duplicity, addiction and broken relationships.

The Menzingers Talk With PunkNews

The Menzingers
Jason Tate

Tom from The Menzingers talked with PunkNews about their recent acoustic album:

At its deepest level, it’s almost an existential crisis. We’re older now. The entire band is in our early 30s. We’ve spent this many years working at what we consider to be our craft. We write songs. We play those songs. We book tours and we are able to execute those tours, keep everybody safe, and all those things that come along with that. 

To have that completely taken away, it’s a very bizarre and empty feeling that can arise around that. From there, we have to ask ourselves what we are going to do? This all comes from the personal aspect of us and we decided to write that record and keep us busy to create some sounds that we can share with people. We are going to continue to write remotely and pay attention to what we’re doing to make the best music we can.

Rise Against Talks with Alt Press

Rise Against
Jason Tate

Tim Mcllrath of Rise Against talked with Alt. Press about their recent single:

Yeah, I am seeing that. I’ve seen political action stigmatized by youth culture in the last 20 years at different points. Where being part of a protest or singing a protest song was seen as cheesy or campy. If you were in the street holding a sign, there was a time in the last 10 years where that really wasn’t cool. People decided to put cool points on something as important as societal change. 

That has diminished, and it’s so exciting to see that people understand how important it is to be in the streets and how important it is to not be silent about what’s happening and understand. But being cool and hip is a powerful force. It’s what drives a lot of things. Now you’re seeing people shed those labels, and now they just really care about the world. They’re going to grow up in the world their kids are going to grow up in. And they realize that they’ve got to put their hands on the levers a little bit.

Tim McIlrath Talks Punk Protest Music

Rise Against
Jason Tate

Tim McIlrath of Rise Against talked with Brooklyn Vegan about their new song:

If you can believe it, I wrote this song before the protests and pandemics of 2020. The music is almost a year old at this point, but I didn’t get around to fleshing out the lyrics til late last year/early this year – before the pandemic and the resurgence of the BLM movement. I guess if I had to explain why they sound like they were written this year, it’s because I’ve always trafficked in dystopian imagery. When you do that, you are sort of looking into the crystal ball and trying to see where things are going if we keep going in the current direction. I didn’t think we’d be here now today. But it didn’t stop me from writing “Broken Dreams, Inc.”

Why Spotify Has So Many Bizarre, Generic Artists

Jason Tate

Peter Slattery, writing at OneZero :

While the platform pays only in the neighborhood of a third of a penny per stream if you’re not Drake, it boasts more than a quarter-billion active users. So, if your music ranks highly for a search term, you can accumulate enough listens to steadily make hundreds, in some cases thousands, of dollars a month with minimal effort.

The key to success is to find a phony artist name that Spotify users are likely to type into search. Like Relaxing Music Therapy, some of these “artists” use names inspired by an adjective commonly used to describe music. Others name themselves after popular uses for certain kinds of music, well-known generic tunes like children’s rhymes, or entire music genres. Often, these creators optimize further by titling tracks and albums with related words and reuploading the same songs ad nauseum, which can look especially absurd when filtering to see just a single tune. Relaxing Music Therapy, for instance, has uploaded the track “Stream in the Forest With Rain” 616 times to date.

Soor Offers Customizable Widgets for Apple Music

iPhone
Jason Tate

MacStories details the third party Apple Music app, Soor, and their customizable home screen widgets for iOS 14:

Soor’s Now Playing widget is a much nicer way to find out what you’re listening to. Sticking a small widget on your Home screen or in your Today view will not only display the name of the currently playing song, but also provide artwork and let you know what music is coming up next. 

Bruce Springsteen Talks with Rolling Stone

Bruce Springsteen
Jason Tate

The latest Bruce Springsteen Rolling Stone interview is up for your reading pleasure:

Last year, Springsteen was working through his archives for a follow-up to his 1998 outtakes box set, Tracks, when he “sort of came across these songs.” There’s no particular message in their inclusion. He simply wanted to hear the band play them now, he says, “to be able to go back and sing in your adult voice but with ideas of your youth.… It was kind of insane fun, because the lyrics for all those songs were so completely crazy.”

Yours Truly Track by Track Commentary

Yours Truly
Jason Tate

Yours Truly shared a track by track commentary on their new album, Self Care, over at All Punked Up:

“Composure” is about trying to keep your cool at the end of a relationship and how difficult it can be. It’s natural to be upset, angry and a million different other emotions at once. I wrote it at a time when I really needed to reclaim my self-worth after losing so much of it. I was over being miserable and waiting for acceptance.

Shazam Getting Control Center Button

iPhone
Jason Tate

Jay Peters, writing for The Verge:

Apple bought music recognition app Shazam in 2018, and now it’s integrating it into iOS in another big way — a new Music Recognition feature can identify songs playing around you as well as in apps on your phone. And it even works when you’re listening to music on your headphones.

The new feature is available as a toggle in Control Center, but it does require a developer beta of iOS 14.2 if you want to try it right now.

I use Shazam very frequently, often when watching a TV show or movie. On iOS 14 you can assign “back taps” to a Shortcut, so I assigned a double tap on the back of the phone to a Shazam Shortcut that listens and identifies the song.

MusicHarbor Gets iOS 14 Update

Apps
Jason Tate

MusicHarbor, a great app for tracking new music coming out from your favorite artists, got a big iOS 14 update. MacStories has a rundown of the new features:

MusicHarbor also offers three types of widgets: Upcoming Releases, Latest Releases, and Stats. Upcoming Releases and Latest Releases draw from the albums collected in those sections of the app. Upcoming releases come in small and medium variants, while Latest Releases also includes a large widget. Each type displays a grid of album art, album details in some cases, and release date. The small widgets simply act as launchers for MusicHarbor, while the medium and large ones will open the album tapped.